The New Denpa Men

Genre: Top-Down Turn-Based Monster Collecting JRPG

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local Wireless)

.

Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

The Denpa Men franchise of family-friendly Turn-Based Monster-Collecting JRPGs was previously only available in the West in a trilogy of games released on the Nintendo 3DS eShop (now no longer available), but Japan has enjoyed a few installments we didn’t receive here – namely, 2014’s Denpa Men’s RPG Free! on Nintendo 3DS and 2017’s New Denpa Men’s RPG on mobile devices. Now that the Nintendo 3DS eShop is closed and the original trilogy is no longer available, the series’ creators at Genius Sonority have combined features from these two Japan-only titles to bring us a new free-to-play release on Nintendo Switch in 2024, The New Denpa Men.

For those who are unfamiliar with this series, The Denpa Men games are odd JRPGs whose closest point of reference would likely be the Find Mii games on Nintendo 3DS, with a hint of Pokemon-style Monster Collecting as well. The monsters in question? Tiny floating, colorful, bodysuit-clad men. Picture the character Tingle from the Legend of Zelda series and you have the right idea.

This game has the premise that our world is filled by these little Denpa Men, invisible to our naked eye, and gathering around Wi-Fi hotspots (the game generates them based on the Wi-Fi device’s MAC address). One of the first things players will do when playing this game is to scan the area around them to look for the little guys and catch them. Different Denpa Men gather near different Wi-Fi locations, and the game encourages you to try searching for them in multiple locations to catch a wide variety.

While previous games used the Nintendo 3DS camera to make this a sort of AR game, the Nintendo Switch lacks a camera, so instead players simply use gyroscopic motion control or the analog stick to look around a void as these creatures appear, catching them by aiming at them to fire a net, giving this game a small real-time element, although thankfully players can attempt this as much as they want without penalty, other than the frustration and tedium of your desired catch fading away before you can snag them and being forced to wait until they randomly appear again.

The Denpa Men themselves look a lot like Mii characters due to their simple design. They’re not Miis (which seems odd to me – it would have been a good use of the feature), but they could easily be mistaken for them. As such, they are simple, cartoony characters that aren’t visually impressive, though they do have a lot of personality. And the world they find themselves in is full of character as well, though it’s all depicted using really low-quality 3D visuals. This is joined by a relaxed synthesized soundtrack with pleasant tunes like the Island Theme and Denpa Men Box Theme (the only two songs from the soundtrack I could find at this time, though they’re a decent expectation what to expect here).

The story this time is once again disposable, having you assist a small Denpa Men (apparently even a singular Denpa Men isn’t referred to as a Man) confront a bully by collecting a set of legendary armor. The story here is cute, but not impactful in any way, and the localization is so abysmal that it’s best if you don’t take it very seriously.

As I indicated earlier, players are encouraged to gather a wide array of Denpa Men to be able to form diverse parties, and particularly to have the flexibility to build parties that are best suited for each new area they venture into. Different Denpa Men have varied strengths and weaknesses, as well as different abilities, and there is clearly a strategy to the game where you’ll want to make sure that whenever you enter a new area that you go with a team that has strong typing against the enemies you’ll be up against.

This time around, the curiously high difficulty of the earlier games has been taken down quite a lot, to where players needn’t pay too much attention to typing, and you can usually grind to gain levels to get past any particularly tough area… and either way, you should expect to do a lot of grinding here. This game also completely does away with the permadeath that was present in earlier games, with your entire party revived and healed automatically whenever you return to the island that acts as your home base.

This game’s turn-based combat is extremely simple (each Denpa Man has at most only one ability and a normal attack), but it uses this simplicity to streamline matters – players can easily complete combat within a few seconds, especially when fighting an inferior enemy – at that point, you can simply have your group gang up on the enemy with a single button-press. Rather than provide depth through individual party members, players are given flexibility through a large party size, with your initial four-character party soon expanded to six and then eight, giving you the opportunity to diversify your crew, or double-down on Denpa Men with abilities you find most useful.

The New Denpa Men somewhat retains the streamlined features of Denpa Men 3, allowing you to use a single command to have your party go all-out with magic attacks or simply use normal attacks, or you can opt to mix-and-match this feature with individual Denpa Men you’ve given specific commands to. This game doesn’t have the customized strategies of Denpa Men 3, but this is still a decent way to cut down on the tedium of always telling your entire party what to do in each round of combat.

Another feature that has been retained and even expanded upon from the third game is the ability to decorate your Denpa Men’s house, though now you can customize the entire island. This has little effect on the gameplay, but it’s a nice addition all the same.

Of course, probably the biggest changes in The New Denpa Men are tied to this game’s change to Nintendo Switch, as well as to being a free-to-play game. As you might expect, this means you now have to contend with a premium currency, with both purchasable equipment and island decorations locked behind this premium currency and in addition to in-game shops that have you buying items using gold you can earn through normal play, you now also have shops that will reach into your real-world wallet.

I suppose this sort of change is to be expected for a free-to-play game, although it’s kinda’ gross that it’s in a game whose presentation seems designed to target children. What isn’t expected is that players are now required to be online to play all but the game’s basic offline Denpa Men catching mode. The standard RPG quest will frequently pause to check to see if you’re online, something that not only seems to run counter to the series’ premise of wandering into different Wi-Fi hotspots to encounter different Denpa Men, but that is extremely irritating, and drags down the game’s pacing a bit.

If it wasn’t for The New Denpa Men’s online-only requirement, this would easily the best game in the series so far, even with the dirty feeling you get from these cutesy characters trying to sell you microtransactions. Unfortunately, this online-only requirement completely flies in the face of the series’ identity, making it more difficult to forgive the areas where this game is lacking. If you’re a fan of the series and intend to mostly play the game docked and connected to a network, this is still worth playing, but it’s a shame that this game was hobbled in such a way.

tl;dr – The New Denpa Men is an odd Turn-Based Monster-Collecting RPG, where the “monsters” you’re collecting are little floating multicolored bodysuit-wearing men hanging out around real-world Wi-Fi hotspots. This entry takes the series to free-to-play, and in some ways it’s the best entry yet in the franchise, but it’s really dragged down by the requirement to always be online while playing, and the addition of microtransactions in an otherwise family-friendly game is pretty disgusting too.

Grade: C+

.

This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best New Free-To-Play Game, Worst Monetization/Scam, Most Disappointing

.

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}